today begins the first day of the 5-day long JET Programme Translation and Interpretation Course seminar. the entire seminar is conducted at JIAM, the Japan Intercultural Academy of Municipalities. it’s in Otsu City, located in the south of Shiga prefecture and only 15 minutes away from Kyoto station.
the rooms are nice enough, with a desk, table lamp, tv, lots of storage space, toilet and sink and several mirrors. the food isnt too bad either – we got a prepaid card with money that should cover almost all our meals here.
the difficult part and most stressful aspect is the Japanese, however.
oh my.
the first shock actually was coming here and discovering that there’s A LOT of us – 143 in total, with more than 90 people being in the English course (there’s a Chinese and Korean course too). and somehow everyone seemed to know at least someone else, so it was the whole thicken up your skin and talk to people kind of thing again.
i suppose though, that for that so long as you have a thick skin and dont think too much, you’re gonna be fine. what is difficult however, was the fact that everyone here has really good japanese!
they started off by giving us a whole tonne of materials completely in japanese, and everything after lunch – 4 hours of it – was conducted in japanese too. it wasnt as bad as it could have been, to be honest, but wow. it required A LOT of concentration.
the worst is the japanese standard. apart from there being lots of CIRs, some of them are so good that they sound perfect in japanese and understand way way way more than i do. some people were chosen from the audience to translate stuff, either from English to Japanese or vice versa, and their standard completely blew me away.
how do people get so good?!?!
i have one complaint though, which is that the internet here is very wonky! at the moment only msn is working – i cant see any websites on my internet browsers, although it worked for a while on 2 separate occasions earlier this evening. so i’m not quite sure what’s happening either. beh.
2 comments:
Hi there, I'm a random reader of your blog. I really envy people who get a chance to live in Japan. A friend of mine only lived there for a year but his Japanese has gotten so good that he's now an interpreter! ENVY! anyway, ganbatte!
Hi, I'm a Singaporean and I was reading your blog about the JET programme/experience.
Thanks for writing tons' of interesting stuff. It really opened up my eyes towards a deeper insight into the JET experience.
I use the Anki programme to improve my Japanese. It's just a suggestion so I cannot guarantee that one's Japanese will improve simply by using that programme.
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